In a mobile cellular network, the geographical coverage area is divided into many cells, each of which is served by a base station (BS). Each cell can also be further divided into a number of sectors. When a mobile station (MS) is powered up, it needs to search for a BS to register with. Also, when the MS finds out that the signal from the current serving cell becomes weak, it should prepare for a handover to another cell/sector. Because of this, the MS is required to search for a good BS to communicate with, likely among a candidate list provided by the current serving cell. The ability to quickly identify a BS to do initial registration or handover is important for reducing the processing complexity and thus lowering the power consumption.
The cell search function is often performed based on a cell-specific reference signal (or preamble) transmitted periodically. A straightforward method is to do an exhaustive search by trying to detect each reference signal and then determine the best BS. There are two important criteria when determining reference sequences for cells or sectors. First, the reference sequences should allow good channel estimation to all the users within its service area, which is often obtained through a correlation process with the reference of the desired cell. In addition, since a mobile will receive signals sent from other sectors or cells, a good cross correlation between reference signals is important to minimize the interference effect on channel estimation to the desired cell.
Just like auto-correlation, the cross-correlation between two sequences is a sequence itself corresponding to different relative shifts. Precisely, the cross-correlation at shift-d is defined as the result of summing over all entries after an element-wise multiplication between a sequence and another sequence that is conjugated and shifted by d entries with respect to the first sequence. “Good” cross correlation means that the cross correlation values at all shifts are as even as possible so that after correlating with the desired reference sequence, the interference can be evenly distributed and thus the desired channel can be estimated more reliably. Minimization of the maximal cross-correlation values at all shifts, which is reached when they are all equal, is refer to as “optimal” cross correlation. Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus for a fast cell search technique that utilizes a reference sequence having good cross correlation and good auto-correlation.